For
experimenting with making the catalogue (and its implicit limitations) not just readable, but also to a certain extent “writable”, meaning that library records – that are usually “untouchable” – can be discussed, negotiated, and modified by the user;
making readable the technical and social choices and the ways they are made.
making porous categories that were assumed to be stable and fixed;
raising questions regarding authority, responsibility and accountability in the representation of knowledge in the catalogue.
With the purpose
of exploring and caring for a library’s technical infrastructure and catalogue;
of questioning the prevailing separation between the user and the service systems, as well as the division between the work of a technician and the work of those using a technical structure;
of moving away from proprietary software with limited choices to using open-source software to open up the possibilities for different layers of usage and engagement with the catalogue and, most importantly, the potential for modification;
of experimenting with ways to track and record suggested modifications to catalogue records in order to show that the records themselves are cultural objects.
In contact
with Anita Burato and Martino Morandi, who talked to us about Infrastructural Manoeuvres, a project they initiated at Gerrit Rietveld Academie and Sandberg Instituut in Amsterdam in 2018.
See: library catalogue interface with annotated audio conversation.
with nearly everybody else in this syllabus;
with the work of Valentina Borremans and Ivan Illich with CIDOC in Mexico from the 1970s on.